You Know Who You Are

Colin Kidd: About Last Year, 25 January 2018

Fall Out: A Year Of Political Mayhem 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 559 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 0 00 826438 3
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... with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting enough, but, within the realm of what was manageable, did the May government marshal its counsellors as effectively as it could have done? Cameron’s European advisers had deliberately ...

Tremendous in His Wrath

Eric Foner: George Washington, Slave Owner, 19 December 2019

‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon 
by Mary Thompson.
Virginia, 502 pp., £32.50, January 2019, 978 0 8139 4184 4
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... to create a disciplined workforce and to the ways slaves resisted his demands. He was ‘by no means an easy man to work for’. He insisted that slaves and hired workers adhere to his own highly demanding work ethic. ‘I expect my people,’ he wrote to one overseer, ‘will work from daybreaking until it is dusk,’ a regimen which in summer, as ...

Plots don’t stop

Leo Robson: ‘The World and All That It Holds’, 13 April 2023

The World and All That It Holds 
by Aleksandar Hemon.
Picador, 336 pp., £18.99, February, 978 0 330 51332 6
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... the teller is as important as the tale, there is no advantage to withholding information about the means by which the narrator arrived at the story, or why he cares. Knowing that every description of Pinto’s thoughts is derived from Rahela’s account of her conversations with him makes a difference. It goes some way to explaining the caricatural nostalgia ...

Coins in the Cash Drawer

Philippe Marlière: Jean Jaurès’s Socialism, 2 November 2023

A Socialist History of the French Revolution 
by Jean Jaurès, translated by Mitchell Abidor.
Pluto, 259 pp., £19.99, July, 978 0 7453 4219 1
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Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism 
edited by Jean-Numa Ducange and Elisa Marcobelli, translated by David Broder.
Palgrave, 158 pp., £89.99, June 2022, 978 3 030 71961 6
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... as a set of demands that served as a precursor to full equality for all. Socialism was the means to ensure the enlargement of rights beyond those enshrined in the text – individual and public freedoms – to the economic domain. This was the core of his liberal socialism: anti-determinist; inflected by a belief in the noneconomic needs of individuals ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... Despite the weight of sometimes conflicting detail, however, a distinctive view of what the strike means in the 2020s emerges from Gildea’s testimonies.The more familiar high politics interpretation of the dispute is disrupted by regional perspectives. Gildea tells us, for example, that it didn’t in fact start at Cortonwood: he interviews miners from ...

Love Me or I Shoot You

Christienna Fryar: Three Imperial Wars, 1 August 2024

Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire 
by Erik Linstrum.
Oxford, 313 pp., £26.99, April 2023, 978 0 19 757203 0
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... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...

How to Run a Caliphate

Tom Stevenson, 20 June 2019

... to suffer. Retributive justice was important, but the caliphate also encouraged loyalty by other means. Tamimi has translated the lyrics of dozens of anasheed – patriotic anthems written and recorded by the state’s Ajnad Foundation for Media Production. They vary in quality. Removing the ‘stain of humiliation’ is a common theme, as are the glories ...

Towards the Precipice

Robert Brenner: The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy, 6 February 2003

... corporate executives were under mounting pressure to keep stock prices high by any means necessary, in order to maintain access to cheap finance and the investment funds required to compete; the fact that they had come to depend heavily on stock options for their own compensation naturally quickened the temptation. One after another great ...

Fiction and E.M. Forster

Frank Kermode: At the Cost of Life, 10 May 2007

... not the aspect of Proust that appealed to Forster. Rickie, in The Longest Journey, is a writer, or means to be, but he’s not writing The Longest Journey. Forster notes that Proust ‘takes any and every way, moves backwards and forwards as he likes, led not by the story but by the psychological movement behind it’. Admirable, but not really for him. He ...

South African Stories

R.W. Johnson: In South Africa, 2 March 2000

... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or ...

Child of Evangelism

James Wood, 3 October 1996

The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £14.99, March 1996, 0 297 81764 7
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Is There a God? 
by Richard Swinburne.
Oxford, 144 pp., £20, February 1996, 0 19 823544 5
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God in Us: A Case for Christian Humanism 
by Anthony Freeman.
SCM, 87 pp., £5.95, September 1993, 0 344 02538 1
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Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Hodder, 401 pp., £20, October 1996, 0 340 57107 1
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... medicines, but that it is true. Johnson’s ecclesiastical cynicism – where ‘strength’ means only ‘strength for the Church’ – suspends what is most powerful about Christianity: its claim to be true. Instead he offers the milder language of success: does it work for you? To defend religion’s success is not to defend it. It is to undermine ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...

Le Roi Jean Quinze

Stefan Collini: Roy Jenkins and Labour, 5 June 2014

Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, March 2014, 978 0 224 08750 6
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... into the 1960s, Jenkins declared that the aim of politics should be ‘to use prosperity as a means to a more civilised and tolerant community’, which led him to this revealing statement of belief: ‘One of the central purposes of democratic socialism is to extend throughout the community the freedom of choice which was previously the prerogative of ...

How confident should she be?

Richard Lloyd Parry: Aung San Suu Kyi, 26 April 2012

The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi 
by Peter Popham.
Rider, 446 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 1 84604 248 5
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... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...

The devil has two horns

J.G.A. Pocock, 24 February 1994

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Minerva, 692 pp., £8.99, September 1993, 0 7493 9721 7
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... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...